The community in community newspaper

Another week, another free issue of the La Conner Weekly News provided to every home in the La Conner school district. This is the third invitation for you to subscribe, but more: to become more engaged with your neighbors and increase your participation in, yes, the school district, which will be asking for your support of a school levy in February. Last week you were invited to watch – virtually – the annual lighting of the Town Christmas tree in Gilkey Square. And Santa wrote to everyone in the community, child and parent alike.

When you read the paper next week – perhaps as a new subscriber – the news will include La Conner’s Town Council passing its 2021 budget. By the last issue of the year there will be a story of Fire District 13’s 2021 budget being approved.

Your local newspaper covers all aspects of the community, from Santa sightings to Mavrik Marine’s expansion at the Port of Skagit’s property to new businesses opening on First Street, to the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community’s adding administrative offices on Reservation Road. That is almost the literal nuts and bolts of what is going on in the place we call home.

But the coverage of budgets and buildings and bridge lightings does more than keep you up to date. This news of your community may not be exclusive, or exhaustive, but it comes with more details than generally available elsewhere and it is developed for you. Some parts of the paper are more entertaining than others, but all of it is to keep you, neighbors and community members, informed. That encourages your engagement, indeed your greater participation, be it as a school team coach, decorating a Christmas tree or speaking before the school board.

Your community’s newspaper is a cheerleader for citizen involvement furthering democracy’s function. Democracy starts with our right to vote, expressed in November, but citizen engagement means residents speaking at town council meetings, participating in the school district’s La Conner Connects, marching down Morris Street and sending letters to the newspaper. These activities and more keep us bound, neighbor to neighbor and project to project. Please share your thoughts in letters, too.

As we finish the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, a year like no other, we are unable to gather, be it for last summer’s Pioneer Picnic or this fall’s Art’s Alive or the holiday season’s festivities. Each of these connect us one to another. While some of us are more isolated than we want to be, others are undeterred and continuing their volunteering activities or sprouting new ones, such as the First on First promotion of eating and shopping in support of La Conner’s merchants monthly First Fridays this fall.

We learn about local activities in different ways. In the old days there was the telephone on the kitchen wall as well as the newspaper. These days there is texting and posting of photos and videos on social media. But your local newspaper has another function. It prints facts, offering a record to the community. It provides perspective and synthesis. And it builds trust, or it does not. Trust, of course, requires two parties in relationship.

Your newspaper means to be a foundation and building block both, for the ongoing development of this place we call home. Its work starts with having people subscribe to and read and discuss the newspaper, but its success is witnessing and describing the many efforts people make to improve – and sometime question and challenge – the larger community.

The La Conner Weekly News is one tool in the community’s toolbox. I invite you to make it a part of your week and use it as often and as in many ways as makes sense to you.